ABCD Lars & Roemer

Roemer
van
Toorn
in
conversation
with
Lars
Lerup
urgencies could architecture help to resolve? And is your concept of
ambiguity a part of the solution?
Well, I think you caught me! Let me put it simply: “When architects
gave up designing housing, we lost Architecture.” And I lost interest
and moved on to urbanism. Redemption lies in waiting. In fact, any
building designed to house a collectivity is part of this redemption
(although I am skeptical as to whether museums should be counted
here). I therefore take Rem’s suggestion to mean that architects
should take on the ugliness – these forgotten domains of hospitals,
supermarkets, post offices, public housing, slums, motels, new towns,
back offices, suburbia, etc.
My own sense of beauty is still fully intact; it took years to construct
and hovers, as I have said, somewhere between minimalism and
Japanese traditional design culture. Broken beauty is far more
beautiful than its undamaged other. So, since so much is broken, my
aesthetic pleasures are still abundant.
V as in Violence
I agree with Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière that the political only emerges
when disagreement (dissensus) is part of the system you build. A certain
foreignness (violence) is needed to liberate the user from within. Through
disagreement within a system, and not just opposition or critique, a final answer
can be avoided and a liberating kind of agonism realized. How exclusion – i.e.,
what you experience standing in front of a the Berlin Wall – can make you
wonder what happens on the other side (while demystifying the role of
institutional powers), or how a strange (violent) form by virtue of its
inconsumerability can provoke you to complete it in movement (like the CCTV
building in China by OMA), all can push you to look beyond the cliché.
Voyeurism, the perversion of the look, framing the view, can be yet another act of
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